From cold fusion to human-powered flight: The greatest tech hoaxes

P.T. Barnum is famously credited with saying, “There is a sucker born every minute.” This week’s viral videos of a Dutch man taking flight powered only by a set of flapping wings certainly demonstrates that we all want to believe in the power of technology. There were plenty of skeptics ragging on the videos for flaws in production and physics, but an equal number of faithful rose to the defense of fictional Jarno Smeets, until he himself — in the person of filmmaker Floris Kaayk — revealed the entire effort was an elaborate hoax.

Technology has been intertwined with hoaxes for centuries, both in schemes designed to fake the existence of amazing or implausible science and technology, and as a tool to pull off hoaxes of all types. Read on to find out about some of the most amazing — or at least my favorites.

The Mechanical Turk

Mechanical Turk is best known today as the Amazon-owned website where you can get tasks completed by people around the world, often for only pennies. Its namesake though is one of the longest-running and widespread tech hoaxes of the pre-internet era. In 1770, an amazing chess-playing machine began touring the world, defeating such luminaries as Ben Franklin and Napoleon Bonaparte. The brainchild of Wolfgang von Kempelen, the apparent robot was actually a carefully designed bit of stagecraft that allowed a human chess master to hide inside and direct the machine’s robotic arm. It was not found out until over 50 years after its creation, and continued touring even after that, until 1854.

Over the course of its career at least a half dozen different chessmasters were hired to operate the controls and defeat their unsuspecting opponents.

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